


Star vs. The Forces of Evil Meta

by A_Friendly_Irin



Category: Star vs. The Forces Of Evil
Genre: Media Criticism, Meta, Nonfiction, Protagonist-Centered Morality, Racism, Representation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-03-08 20:22:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18901972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Friendly_Irin/pseuds/A_Friendly_Irin
Summary: Thoughts on several of the main characters, and their end states.





	1. On Moon's character arc; Eclipsa's character arc; and monster reintegration

I’m really disappointed with how Moon and Eclipsa turned out in season 4. It’s a shame, because I really liked them in season 3 and where it looked like their characters were going. Moon is at first set up to be the generic strict mean mom for the girl to have her teenage rebellion against, but then Star is forced to acknowledge she was actually right about a lot of things and everything is a lot more complicated than she thought. She buckles down and rescues everyone instead of getting petty at Star and she turns out to be this cool warrior queen with a tragic backstory. I liked that! I thought she was becoming a very nuanced and well-rounded character that would help build Star.

Then season 4 happens and she’s back to being super petty. “Oh well you gave my crown to your new best friend so I can’t  _possibly_  lift a finger to help you or anyone, go off and handle this crisis on your own my unstable teenage daughter. P.S. Actually I’m forming an alliance with Nazi ghosts to overthrow your friend who I ‘don’t trust’ for reasons totally unrelated to the fact she married a member of the hated underclass.” What even? I could buy her genuinely feeling exhausted from queening and grateful to pass the buck to someone else for once even if from an objective standpoint it’s a bad idea, but we see no evidence of that. By all appearances she  _loved_  being queen and was incredibly good at it – and we see that all over again the moment she gets over herself and builds the human commune.

And this all interacts so weirdly with the monster reintegration subplot. At first I was actually pretty interested in the setup this season – yes, you can’t just sign a law freeing the oppressed and expect that to be the end of it! Things are going to be awkward and it will take a lot of work to create lasting stability! And then… we spend all our time on how hard it is for the dispossessed humans who still apparently have infrastructure and civilization and a lot of stuff they sure didn’t seem to allow the monsters. Sorry, humans, after the first few times I no longer care that you want to take back the homes you stole from this world’s original inhabitants instead of just building a new one, which as Moon shows is a totally valid option. Why did we get episode after episode on the humans’ feelings, but only the tiniest of bit scenes on how the monsters felt about regaining everything they’d lost?

And Eclipsa. Poor, poor Eclipsa. Everyone is so awful to her and she just rolls over and takes it every single time. We spend so many stupid, stupid plotlines on her trying to get peoples’ approval… why? She is a monarch, not a president. As a rebel princess she should be fully aware that she can’t please everyone and doesn’t need to. Why does she care so much about the humans’ opinion of her? Why do  _we_  have to care so much? Where are all the monsters in this – why were none of them upvoting her during the song?

And then okay, so she’s neglecting her duties as queen to obsess over freeing her husband, which is bad because… Globgor was actually evil, oh no! Except LOL J/K he was a perfect saint like all the other monsters so actually his imprisonment really was a heinous crime and Eclipsa was totally justified in spitting on the Magic Commission’s laws trying to free him. And after all this, she  _thanks_  Moon for purposefully trying to get her and her family imprisoned and/or killed on false charges because it happened to work out well? How long does she have to keep apologizing for the abuse other people heap on her? She’s been so infantalized – she was not this much of a doormat or desperate for approval in season 3, but now all she cares about is her family and popularity contests.

I suppose it all comes back to the fact our culture just can’t accept the oppressed as justified in fighting back or lashing out. The only reason it’s ever wrong to hurt people is if they are absolute saints who would never hurt a fly. Eclipsa and the monsters can’t ever be angry or fight back, because then they wouldn’t be sympathetic anymore. That trope is just so, so slimy to me. It gets progressive brownie points because hey, it’s saying oppression is bad! But what it’s actually depicting is an idealized fantasy of oppression that never actually exists in reality, so that when people see real oppression they can’t recognize it. It’s become so common at this point that I can’t attribute it to ignorance or accident anymore – this is propaganda.

And it’s such a shame, because this show seemed like it was going in genuinely subversive directions – but no, when it comes time to wrap up, everything has to snap back to a standard narrative. [I also had this problem with  _Steven Universe_](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Farchiveofourown.org%2Fworks%2F16029737%2Fchapters%2F37413149&t=YjRhMWE4Yjk5NTIyNjJiMDQxNjI1MTBkYzVlMWQ3ODIxMzJmOWI4Mix5UW5JVGFFdw%3D%3D&b=t%3AuNWr44bPgx2r6X08uc_QCQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Fafriendlyirin.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F184919741723%2Fmore-grouchy-and-spoilery-star-vs-the-forces-of&m=1), and I’m worried this is going to be a pattern. The writers seemed genuinely interested in these themes and in telling a different story – why else would we spend so much time on Eclipsa turning out be completely justified, on Star confronting her own privilege, on Tom and Star’s relationship, on all these subversive elements that at the last minute turn out to not matter? Was I misreading it the whole time, and they were just so staggeringly incompetent they thought they were sending the complete opposite messages of what they were? Or is there something more sinister to this, some kind of proclamation from on high saying they had to insist they were just kidding the whole time?


	2. On Starco, and bait-and-switching

I was expecting Starco from the very beginning of the show. I was briefly intrigued by the romantic subplots in seasons 2 and 3, but I was never really expecting we'd end up anywhere different. However, I was  _not_  expecting the show to retcon it into being love at first sight. Even when I try not to have any hope, shows find new ways to disappoint me.

I actually liked the way the romance was presented up to now and the way it developed. I thought the subplot where he didn’t reciprocate her feelings and she had to deal with it was a genuinely mature and interesting take on things, but apparently now that… never actually happened? I liked all the stuff with Tom growing so much as a person because of her and genuinely changing, but what was even the point of that if he was just going to spontaneously remove himself from the plot in time for our last-minute finale hookup?

I genuinely don’t understand why the show spent so long on this will-they-or-won’t-they if we were just going to end up with such an utterly cliche tropey romance. It’s 2019 and we’re still doing the “nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of the male and female leads hooking up” plot? Really? We can do so much better.

My takeaway from this is that more people need to watch  _The Vision of Escaflowne_.


	3. On Eclipsa and Solaria's reconciliation

I did not like the scene between Eclipsa and Solaria in the  _Star vs. The Forces of Evil_  finale. I understand it feels good to reconcile with estranged family, but… that’s not a possibility for everyone, and if ever there was a time to provide that representation, it was here. Solaria didn’t just hurt Eclipsa. She started a genocide against people Eclipsa loved that extends into the modern day. Her rejection of Mina seems to be meant as an apology for that too, but like… too little too late. Her change of heart is also completely inexplicable – how did she go from “all monsters must die” to “I’m totally cool with my half-monster granddaughter”? Is showing her a monster baby really all it would have taken?

Personally, I think it would have been a lot more powerful to just have the scene where Eclipsa looks away from Solaria and end the thread there. Eclipsa’s mother was a terrible person who hurt her deeply. It’s deeply sad to have to acknowledge that, but it is a thing that happens in real life, and kids deserve to see at least one thing that validates anger and hurt they may have at bad parents instead of being assured that they really still love them deep down.

> _On Tumblr, someone commented:_
> 
> Tbh, yes, that’s all it takes for some people. There are people who hate the LGBT+ community and immediately change to support it when they find out their kid is LGBT+. A weird comparison, but one that works.

This is true, but those people typically stop short of making it their life’s mission to murder all gays.

Like I think that’s what bothers me the most – this is all about Eclipsa. It’s not acknowledging the many, many other people Solaria hurt, including the entire monster population that’s slated for execution this very moment because of the actions Mina took in Solaria’s name. Even if Eclipsa is willing to forgive Solaria for what she did to her, it’s not her place to forgive her for what she did to everyone else. But Eclipsa gets to have her happy ending, and that’s all that matters.

I have the same problem with the ending overall – fusing Earth with Mewni is not going to go well for anyone but the protagonists, but it’s still presented as a perfect ending because the protagonists got what they wanted and that’s all that matters.


	4. On Toffee and Mina, oppression narratives, and framing

Let’s talk about framing.

 _Star vs. the Forces of Evil_  is, ostensibly, a story that analyzes and criticized the trope of demonizing the ugly and the Other as inherently evil. The major twist halfway through the story is the realization that the “monsters” Star has been fighting were actually unfairly oppressed and robbed of their rightful homes by her ancestors, and much of the latter half of the story is her attempt to make reparations for this wrong. The story even goes to the lengths of drawing very explicit parallels to real-world colonialism and the current anti-immigrant movement in the Western world.

I would say the story does a decent job of following through on this. Star undergoes a genuine change of heart and makes real sacrifices to help the monster population. But I don’t think it manages to completely avoid some of the negative tropes associated with this narrative.

The story has two major villains, Toffee the monster extremist and Mina the human extremist. Since this is, supposedly, a story about deconstructing tropes surrounding race, prejudice, and oppression, one would think the monster extremist would be the one to get a redemption arc where the inherent goodness behind his flawed methods is recognized, while the oppressor extremist would be the true villain who has to be put down.

Yet it’s the reverse. Toffee is gruesomely and unceremoniously murdered -- the only character in the entire series to get killed off 100% stone-cold dead prior to the finale, it’s worth pointing out -- halfway through the series and is barely ever mentioned again, while the ghostly Mina inexplicably gets  _resurrected_  in the finale and is allowed to ride off into the sunset with barely a disapproving look from Star.

So apparently, it’s okay for the hero to murder someone --  _shockingly_  gruesomely for a kid’s show, I might add -- if they’re a monster, but doing the same to a human is unthinkable. Even just quietly letting a  _ghost_  fade away along with the magic, absolving Star of any direct moral culpability was apparently too much.

Star gives a token acknowledgement at the very end that Toffee was right, but that’s all it is: token. She never reflects any further on his actions or expresses remorse over the fact that she  _personally murdered him_. The oppressed is conveniently removed from the narrative so we don’t have to think about what he has to say.

And I think it’s also worth pointing out that their crimes aren’t even equal, even though Toffee is portrayed as the eviler one. Mina tried to genocide  _the entire monster population_ , and the only thing that stopped her was that she didn’t think that was good enough unless she was sure she got them all in one fell swoop. Toffee could have easily done the same when he took over Mewni, but instead only killed like five people -- who of course turned out to be fine because this is a kid’s show and we can’t actually kill people UNLESS THEY’RE TOFFEE, THEN WE CAN SEAR OFF THEIR SKIN AND WATCH THEIR FLESH DRIP OFF THEIR BONES, THAT DEFINITELY WON’T TRAUMATIZE ANYONE.

The worst of the monsters can’t even hold a candle to the worst of the humans, yet their fates are totally disproportionate to their actions. The oppressed are, as ever, acceptable losses, but God forbid we harm a single hair on the head of even the worst of the oppressors.

 

_On Tumblr, someone commented:_

> [...]
> 
> Anyway, I’d say that Mina didn’t need a transition into villainy because she was presented as villainous from the start. Remember that in S1/S2, Star is pretty naive about the racist bigotry she was raised with, and Marco often sees things she doesn’t.
> 
> Well, obviously Marco instantly recognized Mina has a kook Star shouldn’t be looking up to … and he was right. Turned out she was a violent anti-democratic psychopath bent on taking over the world once she found out Earth didn’t have a “proper” dictatorial ruler.
> 
> And after that first episode … well, they never had to change Mina’s character. At all. She didn’t have character  _growth_ , she only had character  _development_  in the sense that we got to see more and more about her. But she’s been around for hundreds of years so what you see now is what you get. She’s not interested in changing, and when Moon tries to suggest she find a new purpose in life … she simply refuses.
> 
> But that’s really a good way, I think, to show Star’s main struggle and conflict. It’s easy to just kill those you hate and dubiously cry that it’s for “Justice!” - the way Solaria and Mina did. But that’s not really what Star was struggling against. She was struggling against  _racism_. And you don’t just stamp that out by killing the “right” people.
> 
> So in the end, obviously Mina had no change of heart, and neither did Manfred. But Maude Maizley and Moon (maybe) had a change of heart. 
> 
> _“But even then, I still don’t feel that happy with the decision to let this change in attitude result in this demoralizing final conflict. Maybe it’s the idealistic action-adventure geek in me, but I wanted the show to end with Star and company overcoming this conflict for good, or at least taking one big step to solving this problem once and for all.”_
> 
> I can understand your frustration. The tone of this show is mostly lighthearted, so it’s reasonable to expect it to offer some satisfying escapist satisfaction in the end.
> 
> For me, though, I kind of felt like  _Star_  was hinting at something different from the usual fare in S1/S2, and then S3 followed through with those hints in what was - to me - an artistic triumph. It was such a contrast, to other shows! I mean … of course, being different just for the sake of being different usually isn’t great. But this really hit the spot for me.
> 
> So … there are indeed a lot of other shows out there, and they tend to offer more definitive victories for the good guys. In particular, I’d point to  _Steven Universe_  which offers an upbeat wish fulfillment alternative to the heavier realistic struggle presented by  _Star_.
> 
> _  
> “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the message or the writers’ efforts, but is this not a show about magical princesses from another dimension finding love? Yes, we’ve seen Star and company on the losing end more than once, usually for a point (e.g. _Storm the Castle, Bounce Lounge, Conquer_ ), and most seasons ended with Star nearly losing or only having a hollow victory. But we’ve seen do so many crazy things, both for fun and for the greater good–wouldn’t it be nice to let Star have one sure victory, even if it was only temporary?“_
> 
> Star does get one sure victory in the end - she gets Marco Diaz. While she cares deeply about her ideological struggle against racism, she doesn’t let that social justice struggle define her as a person. Interestingly, Star doesn’t destroy Magic to defeat racism - she had no expectation that it would do that. She did it merely to save the lives of the monsters and her friends/family (Globgor counts as her family).
> 
> But if it weren’t for the many lives directly on the line, Star would have chosen Marco first. For better or worse, her love of Marco really was something that did indeed define her - moreso than anything else. The fact that she chose countless lives over being with him is merely a sign that she’s a decent person, not that Marco wasn’t the most important thing to her … uhh … okay. Well okay, actually Star didn’t chose those lives over Marco. She  _still_  went in after Marco after saving their lives.
> 
> And as for defeating an evil villain? She definitively defeated Toffee. I understand that a lot of fans speculated about him coming back, but just seeing the way he was killed off on screen? I would have bet against it.
> 
> And it’s not just the way Toffee was brutally killed off on screen. It’s how Toffee had no following and how he was NOT part of a movement. We see that in the past, he was some sort of warlord who built up a following of apparently loyal soldiers, but there’s no longer any hint of this in current times. It seems that Moon thoroughly stamped out Toffee’s band, so much so that the only other member we see (Rasticore) has no interaction with modern Toffee at all. Heck, Rasticore even throws in with a mewman, and actually leaves her when she reveals her monster side (as well as a sadistic streak similar to Toffee’s).
> 
> In modern times, Toffee’s just a loner working on his own secret agenda. He has no confidants who even know his agenda, much less any fellow true believers.
> 
> It’s the perfect “movement” to kill off just by lopping off the head. Toffee’s dead? His whole “movement” is dead. There’s no one who even knows what his plan was, much less anyone to continue it. When Toffee is killed off, there’s no hint of any remaining threat. His corruption of magic has been undone, he’s been obliterated, and even the potentially sympathetic Ludo is just delighted to be rid of Toffee.
> 
> In contrast, of course, Mina explicitly brags that killing her would solve nothing, even though it would be so easy to kill her.

_From which I highlighted:_

> It’s easy to just kill those you hate and dubiously cry that it’s for “Justice!” - the way Solaria and Mina did. But that’s not really what Star was struggling against. She was struggling against  _racism_. And you don’t just stamp that out by killing the “right” people. 

Yes, you absolutely can, and yes, it would absolutely be just, especially in the context of demagogues stirring people up. If you disincentivize people from performing racist actions, you may not have stamped it out in the ideological sense, but you can sure stop the harm it does, which is what really matters. Killing Mina wouldn’t solve everything, but that doesn’t mean it would solve  _nothing_. The racism exists independent of her, yes, but she’s actively making it worse.

Moreover, she  _literally tried to genocide the monsters five minutes ago_. Big picture arguments are irrelevant here, she personally committed a crime and she should face justice for it.

“Fighting back makes you just as bad” is the exact message I was criticizing in my original post. Racism is violence against a group based on intrinsic traits that they cannot change. Anti-fascism is violence against a group based on their  _beliefs_ , the things they  _choose_  to act on. One of those things is a valid thing to judge people by, and one isn’t. They’re not the same.


End file.
